New rules on the block

Katowice climate negotiations have yielded a disciplined rulebook for future. It’s now time to deliver.

Climate talks progress after days of deadlock — People attend a Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice demonstration before the final session of the COP24 U.N. Climate Change Conference 2018 in Katowice, Poland. (Photo: Reuters)

As the latest UN climate negotiations finally drew to a close this weekend in Katowice, Poland, negotiators finalised a new set of rules to operationalise the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as a year-long “Talanoa Dialogue”, focused on finding new ways to enhance action and ambition. While doing so, the international community also hoped to send an urgent political signal, given the dire warnings in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on 1.5°C and the 2018 UNEP Gap Report, highlighting just how far states are from this temperature goal.

Although deep political divisions muted the Katowice signal, negotiators did indeed deliver the bulk of the rules to operationalise the Paris Agreement — a significant diplomatic achievement in the current geo-political context. Particularly with the US’s announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and hearty embrace of coal, and, the newly-elected Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s equivocation on the agreement and withdrawal of its offer to host next year’s conference. While the rules on markets remain out of reach for now and the rules in general could have been more robust, the basic rules needed to implement the Paris Agreement are now in place.

The Katowice rules will perform several important functions. First, they seek to instil discipline in a process governed by “national determination”. Under the Paris Agreement, states have complete autonomy on the nature and type of climate actions they choose to take, subject to the expectation that they represent a progression on past actions. However, the rules now require them to provide detailed information of their actions. If states have absolute economy-wide targets, they need to provide quantifiable information on their reference points for measurements, the gases covered, their planning processes, assumptions and methodological approaches, how they consider their contribution as fair and ambitious, and how it contributes to the objective of the regime.

Second, the rules flesh out the obligations of states identified in the Paris Agreement, and make them meaningful. For instance, the Paris Agreement contained a general obligation for developed countries to report biennially on their provision and mobilisation of climate finance. The rules identify 15 specific pieces of information that states should submit in these reports, including “projected levels of public financial resources to be provided to developing countries”.